Go back to 2001. Bernardi is in his final year as mayor of Syracuse. Kate O'Connell becomes the official Democratic designee for mayor, and has a big lead over Matt Driscoll and several other Democratic candidates in early polling. Bernie Mahoney decides to run on the Republican side, since Bernardi can't run again due to term limits.

While Driscoll clearly faces an uphill battle to catch O'Connell, Mahoney quietly waits in the wings, hoping the Democratic candidates beat the daylights out of each other before the primary.

Then Bernardi leaves to take a job with HUD in Washington, and everything changes. Driscoll, the Common Council president, assumes the job of mayor. He begins aggressively cleaning the city streets, and he makes a bold move by appointing Dennis Duval as the city's first black chief of police. That early performance captures the civic imagination of a city that had been stuck in the doldrums. Driscoll cuts into O'Connell's lead, and it seems to be anyone's race heading into the mayoral primary ...

On Sept. 11, when the terrorist attacks shock the nation. The primary is postponed. Driscoll and other incumbents benefit from what analysts call "a halo affect," when voters rally around their elected officials in times of fear and crisis. In the rescheduled primary, Driscoll blows everyone away. Bernie Mahoney, who had envisioned a general election campaign against a Democrat wounded by a damaging primary, instead finds himself facing an incumbent with a growing wave of support ...

An incumbent created, much to Mahoney's chagrin, because another Republican gave up the mayor's office.

Driscoll would roll to an easy victory in the general election. Still, it's easy to wonder what might have happened had Bernardi finished his term. Would Kate O'Connell now be well into her second term as mayor? If Driscoll had not won, would Joanie Mahoney - stung by what she saw as a deck stacked against her father in the 2001 race - have ever made a strong but losing run for mayor in 2005, a close defeat that gave her the name recognition to win two years later in her bid for county executive?

These are questions that may seem far-fetched ...

But they are no more far-fetched than if you'd told someone 10 years ago that Roy Bernardi would become a cabinet-level adviser to the president.